September 28 - 30, 2018

Kotlin: Safe, Pragmatic Interoperability on the JVM

Saturday - Sep 29 9:00 AM
- CARLISLE

Kenneth Kousen

President, Kousen IT, Inc.

Kotlin is a practical language designed for the JVM. It focuses on pragmatism and safety, with an emphasis on interoperability and tool support. Kotlin is statically typed and includes null checks in the type system itself. The language runs anywhere Java does, from microservices to Android apps. This workshop will show how to use Kotlin to simplify anything you originally planned to do in Java.

Kotlin combines object-oriented programming with functional features like lambda expressions, functional types, and data classes. Since it comes from JetBrains, the company that produces the IntelliJ IDEA development environment, it's tool support is excellent. IntelliJ even provides a Java-to-Kotlin converter to help you get started.

This presentation will cover the basic types, defining and calling functions, programming with lambdas, higher order functions, and DSLs. The goal is to give you enough background to be productive while you continue to learn and grow with the language.

About Kenneth Kousen

Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the O'Reilly books “Modern Java Recipes” and “Gradle Recipes for Android” and the Manning book “Making Java Groovy”. He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle.

In 2013, 2016, and 2017 he won a JavaOne Rockstar award. His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.